CSDIC is best known for the transcripts of prisoner conversations it generated through covert listening. Yet these dialogues stand largely on their own: they contain no material to explain why particular prisoners and conversations were monitored. The chapter argues that to understand the purpose of these transcripts, we need to look beyond them, to the other kinds of reports CSDIC produced that were not derived from microphones. Numbering roughly 2,500 documents, these reports chart a transformation in the information Britain sought to extract from these prisoners. The chapter shows how CSDIC was initially concerned with military information, but that it soon expanded in both reach and ambition, moving from tactical and operational intelligence to more specialised studies aimed at understanding enemy morale and shaping post-war occupation planning. Alongside these efforts, its microphones were also capturing references to atrocities and a growing awareness among some soldiers of the genocidal intent behind them. Yet such revelations remained subordinate to institutional priorities about protecting CSDIC’s methods even after 1945.

To examine how fascist racial rule affected music-making in eastern Europe, this chapter focuses on Warsaw, a major centre of musical life in Nazi-ruled eastern Europe. After Germany occupied Warsaw in 1939 and banned public concerts, hundreds of unemployed musicians turned to the city’s cafés, transforming these venues into makeshift performance spaces. Both in the ghetto and beyond its wall, these intimate venues featured daily performances by stars of the prewar classical, popular,and cabaret music scenes who audaciously tested the limits of Nazi censorship for a war-wearied audience. Drawing on rarely considered sources that shed new light on the repertoires, economics and reception of the cafés, this chapter explores how the dynamic, urban milieu of prewar Warsaw lived on despite Nazi rule.

This chapter summarizes the theoretical account offered and then applies it to several case studies. The chapter begins with an unsuccessful attempt at reparations, offered recently by the Catholic Church. The chapter analyzes where this attempt goes wrong and where it goes right. The chapter then turns to several examples of making reparations, or first steps at making reparations, that have been defended by wronged communities: the Land Back movement, the Makoce Ikikcupi traditional earthlodge-building movement in Minnesota, the work of Ghanian-American physician (former medical student) Joel Bervell to address racism in the practice of medicine, and conceptual transformation of the concepts “woman,” “sex,” and “gender,” as this transformation has been defended by transgender philosophers. These latter three approaches represent good first steps for allies and members of wrongdoer groups to support in their efforts to begin to understand, and make, reparations for the past.

This chapter asks to whom reparations are owed, especially when the original victims of the wrongs are long dead. The chapter distinguishes between a narrow and a broad view of the delineation of the group of victims, arguing for a broad interpretation. The chapter defends an intergenerational wrong argument, arguing that the original wrongs of the past also wrong the broadly construed descendants of those original victims. The chapter defends a constructive politics, arguing that we ought to construct new distributions of power in order that we can better understand the delineation of those to whom (and those from whom) reparations are owed.

With the breakdown of the peace process as its backdrop, this chapter looks at the radicalization of The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) on questions of Israel and Palestine in the period 2000–2023. LO did not mention Israel or the Palestinians in its ordinary congresses in 1993 and 1997 or in the extraordinary Congress in 1994, that is, during the crucial period of the Oslo Peace Process. However, at the start of the new millennium, a significant shift occurred. By the congresses in 2005 and 2009, LO’s position had become more pronounced. The 2009 congress produced a particularly strong statement on Palestine, emphasizing the need for practical follow-up and reflecting a broader global trend of viewing Israel as a criminal state and Palestinians as passive victims. Trade union leaders accused Israel of genocide. LO’s increasingly radical stance on Israel, including calls for a comprehensive boycott and labeling Israel as an apartheid state, reflects the influence of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The chapter traces the anti-Zionism within Norway’s social democratic left after the turn of the millennium.

Exploring the representation of human rights abuses in media and journalism is a vital area of study, given that the media help shape understandings of the world and its conflicts. That said, the scholarship into the intersection of journalism, media, and human rights, which we trace here, is diverse. We identify three major strands: first, researchers who explore how propaganda and journalism can and have exacerbated human rights abuses; second, those who analyse how the conventions of mainstream journalism may lead to the misrepresentation or omission of human rights issues; and third, studies that focus on professional and citizen journalists and non-governmental organization reporters who cover human rights topics, often at significant risk to themselves. Within the tertiary sector, few courses are offered in human rights and media or journalism as a combined field, although the topic may pop up periodically in journalism and human rights courses. Where research clusters committed to human rights journalism exist, passionate individual researchers or small groups of scholars and teachers are most often at the helm.

Museums not only preserve memory but manufacture it. Today, there is a global process of constructing collective memories of twentieth-century wars and genocides. It can be considered global because of the geographic and temporal reach of the two world wars and their subsequent memorialization, because of a shared set of challenges in representing what cannot be shown in war violence, because the responses to those challenges have entailed the creation of networks of international experts (architects, academics, curators, etc.), who often use common tropes and stereotypes to produce museums and their exhibitions, and because of a worldwide circulation of visitors who, sometimes denounced as engaging in a type of “dark tourism,” discover intimate connections between their own lives, past and present, and the sufferings of others.

This chapter describes how dependence on coffee and other primary commodities exacerbated foreign dependency, especially during fluctuations in global primary commodity prices. The chapter discusses the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) origins, including the key paradigmatic ideological foundations of the party while discussing the civil war and the 1994 genocide. The chapter ends by outlining three periods of the evolution of political settlement under RPF rule. Between 1994 and 2000, RPF loyalists were rewarded, while there was increased concentration of power among Tutsi RPF members. In the 2000s, until the early 2010s, RPF leadership centralised control among a smaller clique within the RPF, with increasing elite fragmentation characterising this period. In the third phase after the early 2010s, there has been increased external reliance, and the visible threat of transnational coalitions, comprising RPF dissidents and disenchanted domestic elites, has emerged but been contained.

This chapter deals with individual criminal responsibility rather than state responsibility. A range of international criminal courts and tribunals are examined, from the Nuremberg Tribunal following the Second World War to the more recent International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, which deals with matters remaining after the demise of these tribunals. The International Criminal Court is discussed in some detail and in terms of governing principles and organisation, with references to relevant case law. A number of hybrid courts and other internationalised domestic courts and tribunals are then referred to, including those concerning Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor and Bosnia. The chapter proceeds to examine a series of international crimes, from genocide to war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression. These crimes are analysed and discussed in the light of practice and case law, both in terms of definition and implementation.

This chapter uses the theoretical frameworks of racial formations, racecraft, and intersectionality to analyse the racial dimensions of the two accounts of the massacre of the Pelasgian men of Lemnos and their enslaved Thracian concubines by the Pelasgian women of Lemnos in Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter argues that the epic presents the Lemnian women’s actions as driven by their sense that the Pelasgian men had overturned the racial hierarchy of the island that had previously benefitted them. The Lemnian women’s violent resistance to their change of status is presented by the narrator as an overreaction prompted by sexual jealousy new sentence. But it is presented by Hypsipyle as the restoration of the ‘proper’ racial order. Intersectionality helps to tease out the different racial destinies of the two groups of non-Greek women on Lemnos. The free Pelasgian women are to be the mothers of racially superior sons, whereas the Thracian girls, as mothers of the racially inferior sons of the Pelasgians, are to be exterminated with them so that that Lemnos can fulfil its destiny to become the source of the Greek founders of Cyrene.

Arendt believed that “the idea of humanity” requires all nations to assume responsibility for major crimes of international, rather than purely domestic, concern. Her ideas about international criminal law grew from the Eichmann trial; they appear in Eichmann in Jerusalem and her correspondence with Karl Jaspers about the trial. This chapter provides essential background for her ideas by explaining the “lawyers’ law” concerning state sovereignty, sovereign immunity, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Arendt partly presupposes this background, but she also breaks with it in significant ways. Notably, Arendt breaks from the state-centered orthodoxy when she argues that its concepts don’t apply when a state itself becomes criminal. She also gives the term “crimes against humanity” a substantive meaning (crimes of international concern), which in her view includes genocide as a crime against humanity. In the lawyers’ law, these are distinct crimes with different definitions. The chapter explains what motives the lawyers’ law, to better understand Arendt’s alternatives.

This chapter provides a general overview of World War I, including the scale and character of the military campaigning; the depth of societal mobilization and the transformation of state–economy relations; the consequences for personhood and citizenship; the normalizing of mass killing and genocide; the war’s demographic catastrophe and the pervasiveness of violence and death. “Total war” is distinguished as a main theme for the early twentieth century, whether in the shape of popular experience or the impact of the interventionist capacities of states. Empire, colonialism, and the war’s globality are also marked.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Baha’i religious minority in Iran has been persecuted by the Iranian government, with varying degrees of intensity. In 2011, former UNAMIR Commander Romeo Dallaire recognised their vulnerability in a speech to the Canadian Senate. ‘The similarities with what I saw in Rwanda are absolutely unquestionable’, he opined, ‘we know the genocidal intent of the Iranian state.’ This chapter will examine the plight of the Baha’i between the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and 2024. During this period, the Baha'i community has experienced ongoing and at times severe risk of genocide. Yet various factors have contributed to preventing the ongoing vulnerability from escalating. This chapter examines persecution of the Iranian Baha’i minority, and the domestic and international response. It examines the interplay of risk and resilience factors that have shaped their experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on what can be learned about resilience from this case study of the presence of long-term risk.

Anti-Haitian sentiment is so entrenched in the Dominican Republic that it has its own name: antihaitianismo. The long history of discrimination and persecution of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent includes a massacre in 1937, which claimed around 18,000 lives. While such large-scale violence has not been repeated, Haitians and Haitian–Dominicans have experienced ongoing discrimination and human rights violations. Since the 1990s, there have been repeated mass deportations into Haiti, and in the 2010s, over 100,000 Haitian–Dominicans were stripped of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. By the early 2000s, many recognised the presence of risk factors for genocide in the Dominican Republic. Yet despite the risk, such violence did not occur. Moreover, since then multiple risk assessment models have documented decreasing risk. This chapter explores this constructive trajectory. It considers the risk factors and the factors that have promoted resilience over the period in question. Understanding how and why the violence of 1937 has not been repeated, and the gradual amelioration of risk in the Dominican Republic, can help us identify key factors that promote resilience to genocide.